1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a touch panel, a method of manufacturing the touch panel, and a method of identifying touch conflict on the touch panel, and more particularly to related techniques in association with a touch panel having virtual function button, a method of manufacturing the touch panel having a function button generating a sensing signal in response to a touch event on the touch panel, and a method of further identifying if any touch conflict occurs when users touch the function button on the touch panel.
2. Description of the Related Art
Apple Inc. launched the iPhone smartphone series in year 2007 and the iPad tablet PC series in 2010. After said products prevail on the worldwide markets of smartphones and computers, touch device has become one of the most important operation interfaces of handheld or portable electronic devices (hereafter called portable touch devices). All the major portable touch devices in the current market almost come with a fully touch-based interface for operation without requiring any additional peripheral equipment except that most portable touch devices provide a mechanical Home Key mounted on a bordering portion of an active area of the touch devices thereof. Whenever users press the Home Key, the screen display returns to the Home screen that is most recently viewed during the process of any existing function. Hence, the utilization rate of the Home Key is relatively high. As the Home Key has a mechanical structure, the relatively high utilization rate leads to a relatively high failure rate. According to statistics, one of the most frequent faults of the portable touch devices requesting repair service is faulty Home Key. One way of tackling the issue is to create a virtual button, such as the “AssistiveTouch” function of iPhone or iPad, supported by the operating system of the portable touch devices. The virtual button can reduce the use of the Home Key and thus make the Home Key more durable. However, once the virtual button function is activated, the virtual button will appear on a view area, and it could cause visual interference to users on certain occasions, such as playing a game. Although users can move the virtual button to somewhere else within the view area, the operational inconvenience caused still exists.
Moreover, most portable touch devices usually incorporate a lot of functions, namely, camera, personal digital assistant, game, digital media player, wireless communication, Internet access, e-mail and the like, and have undoubtedly functioned as a small computer. The diversified purposes of the portable touch devices inevitably lead to demand for other buttons in addition to the Home Key available on the portable touch devices. However, if the issue of the fault-prone Home Key is not effectively resolved, the button expansion may still be impractical.
Irrespective of the solution of the fault-prone Home Key or the consideration of button expansion, the touch-based virtual function button on the portable touch devices is a feasible solution that replaces the physical button, initiates the function of the Home Key by touching the virtual function button, gets rid of the mechanical wear of the physical button, and lowers the production cost. However, the trade-off of using the virtual function button is the problem of touch conflict.
When a function button on a touch device is activated by touch, it means that a corresponding function is initiated after the function button is touched. As the portable touch devices are designed for multiple purposes, users may hold or operate the portable touch devices with various postures or at various angles, for example, palm ejection. Hence, the function buttons on a touch device could be touched intentionally or unintentionally under different circumstances. How to determine if a function button is touched intentionally or unintentionally by users is a pre-requisite to the implementation of the virtual function button.